University of Queensland doubles down on Shollenberger – with a straw man argument on ‘confidentiality’ for names already listed in the paper!

The following is a statement from UQ acting Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research and International) Professor Alastair McEwan.

Recent media coverage (The Australian, 17 March 2013) has stated that The University of Queensland is trying to block climate research by stopping the release of data used in a paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

This is not the case. All data relating to the “Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature” paper that are of any scientific value were published on the website Skepticalscience.com in 2013.

Only information that might be used to identify the individual research participants was withheld.

This was in accordance with University ethical approval specifying that the identity of participants should remain confidential.

And, what supposed harm would the knowledge that a few people did some ratings on this paper cause, especially when all of them are already widely known?

Brandon Shollenberger responds:

Suppose it truly is important to keep the identity of raters private. Why then did I just load this image at Skeptical Science:

That shows the identity of 11 raters, and it’s been viewable on Skeptical Science for a couple years now (archived for posterity here). So too has this one (archived here):

This one also identifies nearly a dozen individual participants. It’s true we only found out about these images because of a hack, but that hack happened nearly two years ago. Surely the authors of the paper shouldn’t leave confidential information in a publicly accessible location for two years, even if people have already seen it.

105 thoughts on “University of Queensland doubles down on Shollenberger – with a straw man argument on ‘confidentiality’ for names already listed in the paper!”

Mannish , the process by which a thin skin and massive ego work together so that a person or organisation only dig their own hole deeper by trying to defend the indefensible. While ignoring both common sense and good practice, often to the amusement of the very people there are trying to defame.

For us laypeople, is there an average time it should take to peer review a paper? Are we looking at 1 or 100 a day, based on the reviewer having a fulltime job?
How long and how many reviewers are needed to review ~12,000 studies?

“All data… of scientific value” has been released. Scientific value is in the eye of the beholder. They must release all of the data and let competing researchers decide what is scientifically valuable… Just more perversion of science.

One calculation I remember from an earlier column here showed almost all of the paper summaries (abstracts) were reviewed by a very limited number of the reviewers, and that those averaged something like 220 – 280 per day.

So, 240/day over an 8 hour day = 30 per hour or two minutes evaluating each paper and recording the data and then getting or calling up the next paper fro the stack. No rest breaks, no lunch breaks, no coffee breaks. No pdf-load time (if on a computer) nor pdf search-for-title-time nor click-on-title time nor even a “write-the-title-down” time.

Thanks, that explains a lot. So, it seems they might have had just enough time to review the authors name(s), and compare it to the “approved” list?
And the hidden names and time stamps could expose this farce, correct?
Are the reviewers paid for this service? If so, how, and by whom?
The study count is not arrived at by different reviewers grading the same study? They are all separate studies that were peer reviewed for publication?

UQ officially has self-disclosed that its employee Cook blatantly and willfully violated the UQ ethics approval for his paper when Cook published some abstract rater names in his paper.

Will John Cook and co-authors of ‘Consensus’ be disciplined for their violation of UQ ethics approval for their paper? Will UQ acting Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research and International) Professor Alastair McEwan do his moral duty and discipline Cook et al?

There seems to be a poorly hidden bigotry and arrogance in the academic culture. Delaware, UQ, Virginia, UEA and too many others display a blatant hypocrisy when it comes to what data is public and what is witheld. The more UQ pursues this, the worse it is going to get for them and the culture they represent. But the better it will be for us who send our money, our taxes and our children. This self exposure is not going to accomplish what the fat cats in the Universities wish it would.

John Whitman makes a relevant point. If the UQ posesses any ethics at all, it will promptly and publicly reprimand their cartoonist for the violation they are impotently accusing Brandon of committing.

The behavior of Alastair McEwan and UQ is unethical in this matter. I sincerely hope they continue digging their hole. It will only hurt their rapidly diminishing credibility.

John Cook:
“Damn, I only find out now that I could’ve been rating all this time on the iPad? So much lost opportunity! I just did a half hour exercise on the cross trainer and knocked off 30 ratings while I exercised. I could have spent the last month of exercise racking up 1000 ratings!”

Ari Jokimäki:
“I also have had rather pleasant moments with rating; in the other day I practiced my guitar playing and rated papers at the same time. :) “

This thread is for general discussions of how to market TCP (began in this earlier thread) and make as great an impact as possible. Various surveys find that a disturbing proportion of the public don’t think scientists agree about global warming so I suggest our goal be to establish “strengthening consensus” as a term in the general public consciousness (that goal can be a topic for discussion if required).

To achieve this goal, we mustn’t fall into the trap of spending too much time on analysis and too little time on promotion. As we do the analysis, would be good to have the marketing plan percolating along as well. So a few ideas floating around:
•Press releases: Talked to Ove about this yesterday, the Global Change Institute have a communications dept (well, two people) and will issue press releases to Australian media when this comes out. No plan yet for US media.
•Mainstream Media: This is the key if we want to achieve public consciousness. MSM is an opaque wall to me so ideas welcome. I suspect this will involve developing time lines, building momentum for the idea and consulting with PR professionals like Jim Hoggan.
•Climate Communicators: There needs to be a concerted effort (spearheaded by me) to get climate communicators using these results in their messaging. I’ve been hooking up with a lot of climate communicators over the last month and will be hooking up with more over the next few months so will be discussing these results with every climate communicator I can get hold of, including heavyweights like Susan Hassol and Richard Somerville, to discuss ways of amplifying this message.
Also Ed Maibach is doing research on the most effective way to debunk the “no consensus” myth so I hope to contact him and hopefully include our results in his research. The more we can get climate communicators incorporating our results into their messages, the better.
•Blogosphere: The usual blogosphere networking. Note – Tim Lambert tried to do a similar crowd sourcing effort a few years ago but didn’t succeed in generating enough support for the crowd sourcing – I’m confident we can get it done.
•Climate Orgs: Also have been making connections with various climate organisations and occasionally talked about the possibility of collaboration so will use this project as a focal point as ways to work together. Have to think about this some more
•Google: Coincidentally, started talking to someone who works at Google, specifically the data visualisation department. So I’ve been working with them on visualising the consensus data in sexy, interactive ways. This will be one of the X-factor elements of TCP – maybe they can even provide an embeddable version of the visualisation which blogs and websites can use.
•Video: Peter Sinclair is keen to produce a YouTube video about the TCP results to publish on the Yale Forum on Climate Change.
•Booklet similar to Guide and Debunking Handbook, explaining the results of the peer-reviewed paper in plain English with big shiny graphics (with translations, I suppose – they’re a pain for me to convert but worthwhile doing).
•Kindle/iBook version of Booklet (can you publish free books on Amazon?).
•Embeddable widget: graphic showing the graph of strengthening consensus, updated each year, easily copy and pasteable into other blogs. I like this idea, can make TCP go viral and become ubiquitious on the climate blogosphere!

Expect that one denier response to TCP will be “we’ve always agreed that humans are causing global warming – we just dispute the degree of causation or that climate sensitivity is high” or something to that effect.

When someone posts this response, we can dig into the SkS database and find all instances where that blog/denier gave an argument under the category “It’s not us” – the SkS database will have all that information. Then we can post a blog post “XXX reverses position on humans causing global warming”, citing their worst examples of denying AGW along with their new quote “we don’t deny AGW”.

Then when they go on to post another argument for “It’s not us”, we can point out their contradiction again.

Not sure if we want to get that petty but just something to think about, anticipating the lines of attacks we will face.

@ Brad – you are a bit confused as to what was going on for this ‘study.’ The allegedly anonymous reviewers were NOT reviewing entire papers. They were skimming ONLY the abstracts (5-10 sentence summaries of the articles) to see which way the papers ‘leaned.’ They were not tasked with reviewing entire papers, let alone doing an in-depth analysis of a paper, as Nic Lewis did with the Mann paper.

Nevertheless, doing 200 of these per day is entirely unreasonable. Fatigue will set in, hampering one’s judgement.

Dr C:
Thanks for reminding me of that. Being an engineer, I can’t ever read just the summary of a report and come to a conclusion. I have to dig in and see if their logic holds water or not. I see too many reports that are accepted simply because of who submitted them, or how thick they are and how many cool graphs they have. Or how they were written with lots of technical terms and jargon. “Engineerese”.
Unfortunately, many of those who are writing checks for the work simply do not understand what is presented. And when it is found out after the project is completed ($ millions) that the report had fatal flaws, the project gets buried and no one talks about it. No one gets taken to the woodshed, or called on the carpet to explain, much less make financial atonement.

I think it’s dangerous to say that the images in the latter part of the post were gained from a hack. What evidence is there for this? In fact if it’s what i think it is then there was no hack ever made at Skeptical Science but rather some half-wit attempted some housekeeping and inadvertently made everything on their server public facing. It’s not a hack if you don’t even have to look through the window to see what’s inside.

Also: If this is the first response that the university have since making their threats then it’s quite clear that those threats were bluff and bluster. I truly hope that some concerned Australian taxpayer is making strongly worded complaints to the appropriate authoritative bodies.

I would very much like to see the ethics application and response. That should be available under FOIA.

Just read Cook’s email posted by Barry Woods above. Clearly written before the ratings were completed. Which means the consensus was done and dusted before the ‘study’ started. I expect that many of us understand this but I think more should be made of it. The whole nonsense was nothing more than a concerted effort by a few to push their preconceived notions on a disinterested public.

There may be no end to attempts to acquire the UQ (Skeptical Science) data necessary to explicate and elucidate Cook et. al. data regarding their 97% consensus claims. And subsequent analysis to refute their claim may be fraught with even greater frustration.

Indeed, I believe that refutation can be more effectively assessed by meta-analysis of

(1) the search query the Cook team used to identify the papers in their study,

(2) their decision to focus on interpretation of ”abstracts” (as opposed to the more the revealing results and discussion sections of a paper), and

(3) their methods for analyzing the resulting data, which repeatedly winnowed out uncommitted,skeptical authors with no attempts to identify authors who simply pay “lip service” to AGW.

For those who have been relying on second-hand accounts, I strongly suggest that you refer to Cook’s paper Cook Paper . . . it’s eye opening.
Please read it; for me the money quote is:

“We emailed 8547 authors an invitation to rate their own papers and received 1200 responses (a 14% response rate).”

This quote tells me that only 14% of Climate Scientists were sufficiently engaged/enraged/dedicated/motivated to declare their AGW stance on a simple Skeptical Science questionnaire. And yes, I’m honest enough to concede that the low response rate may also reflect how low an opinion the scientific community ascribes to Cook and his team at Skeptical Science.

From Barry Woods comments:
“To achieve this goal, we mustn’t fall into the trap of spending too much time on analysis and too little time on promotion.” and “Strategy for anticipating denier response”.

This is stunning and reveals the Cook trash is nothing but propaganda. The same journal ERL rejects Bengtsson’s paper for not providing “significant advancement in the field”. The “97% consensus” was already propagated by Oreskes so there is no “significant advancement”. ERL is not a science journal and nothing more than a propaganda rag.

Mannish , the process by which a thin skin and massive ego work together so that a person or organisation only dig their own hole deeper by trying to defend the indefensible

I’ve heard this description (of Mann) many times, but cannot but shake my head at this. Nothing in Mann’s behavior strikes me as a ‘big ego’ ! Rather he comes across as a very small (and narrow) minded insecure individual, who wants to conceal this by lots of loud (but mostly empty) bluster. Possibly this demeanor has been exacerbated by some early limited and subsequently overblown achievment (roughly two lines at an angle)

I mean, has this man every dared to debate, or even just meet, any of his critics on an even field? What I know is that he avoids or even flees any such situation, only gives interviews

Hunter,
Cook is a former (?) cartoonist for whom climate SCIENCE is a hobby. He decided to study psychology and is now attempting to manipulate public opinion by manipulating the opinions of scientists. He believes that the reason people doubt “the science of agw” is simply because the MARKETING MESSAGE has been lacking. He believes that “shiney graphics” and catchy phrases are all the simple folk need in order to jump on his bandwagon.

What is hilarious is that it doesn’t really matter what he tries to dress it up like. The generation that has grown up being taught the principles of “how to market…yourself, an idea, a product, a pyramid scheme, a meme…” can smell a sales pitch a mile away. HE seems to be new to these principles himself, and in typical narcissistic form, he assumes that if HE is new to something, everyone else must be too. His methods are enthusiastically obvious to everyone but himself. He’s nothing more than a psychological used theory salesman.

Everyone, it’s important to note note all raters were listed in the paper, and not everyone listed in the paper did ratings. For example, Robert Way did not rate any papers, but he is an author of the paper. A few of us have been discussing that issue in the comments of one my posts:

hiizuru.wordpress.com/2014/05/18/a-direct-challenge/

zootcadillac, I don’t care to revisit the subject at the moment (I have enough on my plate already), but Skeptical Science was hacked, and those images were made public knowledge as a result of it.

Survey response rates are subject to any number of influences. In the old days of mailed surveys, my dad, who was in advertising, once told me that typical response rates were around 1-3%, while a 10% rate was exceptional.

As a former academic, I can assure everyone that the academic environment, far from being free, is so ideologically hidebound as to be as intolerant of dissent as Nazi Germany. UQ’s behavior is par for the course.

If the subject of their research is the scientist’s papers and the conclusions of those papers then the people examining the scientist’s papers (Cook’s people) are the researchers and not the subjects and therefore hold no unique right to hide how each impacted that collating of papers.
Does that sound right?
cn

Thanks D.J. for your response. Though I don’t have quantitative calibration, like you do, I guess I knew (and wouldn’t have expected) a really high response rate from the authors, because they have busy lives etc . etc.. But I would have thought that the response rates to a survey request from a supposedly respected climate scientist (i.e. Cook) on such an important topic would get a much higher hit rate than an anonymous marketing survey appeal. After all, cold-calling is a lot different than an appeal to your tribe members.

But I admit I have no expertise or significant experience in conducting such external surveys.

Hey guys. All the time I’ve spent on the Cook et al paper has made me re-visit an idea I had some time back. I discuss it a bit in a new post of mine. The short version is, I’m thinking about creating a web site to allow for a public re-analysis of the “consensus.”

Here is an example of subjective Integrity => UQ demarcates climate science to include Cook. Cook demarcates climate science to exclude people who want to see all his data.

Here is a flawed hidden premise of UQ and Cook claims => they falsely presume to be in a position to demarcate correct climate science, but only the climate can demarcate what is climate science. The climate so far only supports demarcation of climate science to exclude the UQ’s or Cook’s imaginary consensus.

As to the publication of Cook’s ‘Consensus’ paper, the journal ERL lacked the intellectual tools to understand the flawed demarcation efforts of UQ and Cook.

I love the fact that the Chancellor is “Pro-Vice.” I am actually Anti-Vice myself, but then I am a skeptic too.

And as far as the marketing or sales acumen of the Skeptical Science folk, I believe that they are getting better at their craft, but they are about level with Snake Oil salesmen at this point. If you are so slick that you can sell “sh.. in a tinbox” you may be a great salesman, but it is still Sh..!

To Brandon, if you do a public reanalysis of the Cook paper, please give reviewers more choices as to the level of agreement with AGW, and hopefully distinguish between AGW and CAGW.

So the reviewers and people who “peer” review this paper are to be a University secret? How can one trust and even know that the paper was then reviewed?

Perhaps the review was by someone named

Mr. Rubber Stamp!

There is a BIG reason why courts are open to the public. Can you imagine if all court cases are to be held in private?

The REASON why court proceedings are held in public is so the public can have trust of the public system. I mean lawyers used to be VERY respected profession. These days I cannot say they reached the same disrespect as Wall Street traders or climate scientists, but certainly widespread disrespect does exist for the profession these days.

While the public has much distain for many court rulings these days, can you image HOW BAD it would be if courts were NOT held in public view? We would have ZERO respect for courts if the norm was private sessions.

Even some big auto shops now have big bay glass windows in the customer waiting area allowing customers to “peer” down into the working area. In other words the “fact” that customers can view is enough for those customers in general not having or even wanting to view their car being worked on – but they can!

The court system LONG ago realized that to have any public confidence in the system the public must have access to court proceedings.

The idea that the people who rubber stamp such papers has any such history or precedent that their names be withheld and the public is to be keep in the dark as to who approved such papers is not only insane, but not of historic precedent.

If one takes away the tradition of disclosure and public viewing of WHO approves and reviews papers then anything can be produced without any kind of scrutiny.

The result will only be public disrespect and mistrust.

ALSO the door and temptation becomes WIDE OPEN to abuse by the institution used to create such papers.

The result then is the University ONLY can rely on some perceived authority, not on its hard fought integrity.

At various points among this and other threads on this subject there have been suggestions that an Australian citizen might wish to submit an FOI request to the university, presumably because there is a conception that non-residents cannot do so. Knowing that here in the UK there is no such restriction, I have delved a little into Australian law. Unless I am mistaken, it seems that the position in Australia is much the same. The Aussie act refers only to “a person”, meaning (to me) anyone. True, there have been decided cases where corporations have applied but that was about the right of an individual to do so and whether a non-personal entity could do so.

I don’t wish to enter the fray for the well reasoned argument that too many combatants would be counter productive but those closer to that fray might wish to consider making a request, wherever they are located.

“I am not a professional climate scientist, but just an interested layman who has been getting familiar particularly to the observational side of the issue by reading the research papers on the subject. I hope I can offer some relevant information on the subject especially as the public discussion on the subject tends to focus more on what climate models can do instead of emphasizing the observational body of evidence which is very large and in my opinion convincing by itself even without far-reaching climate theories or models (which is not to say that climate models are not important and useful tools – they are).!

Cold in Wisconsin, right now I know I want to have ratings for two different things:

1) Endorsement of the greenhouse effect
2) Endorsement of the idea humans are responsible for the majority of the observed warming.

I’m not sure if there’d be any need for a third category to cover whether or not that warming is dangerous. I think the distinction between that category and my 2 is important, but I’m not sure it’d be suitable for this data. There might not be enough abstracts to even look at that topic.

Then again, as long as people don’t have to select a rating for that for most papers (because the default is “no position”), it might not add much burden for the raters.

thank you for clearing up the details about the hack/leak issue. Clearly I am misremembering and conflating two separate issues. Heck, with the level of wine consumption here this weekend after a bereavement I may be making it all up in my head :)

albertkallal says:
May 20, 2014 at 11:57 am
So the reviewers and people who “peer” review this paper are to be a University secret? How can one trust and even know that the paper was then reviewed?
Perhaps the review was by someone named
Mr. Rubber Stamp!
=== === ===

Albertkallal,

I’ve just had a paper accepted for publication.
I can’t tell you by whom. Ever.
It does, however, clearly prove that CAGW-supporting Climate scientists have a smaller ~@~@~@ ;@;@;’ – by about 1.5%/publication – then normal folk of their gender and age.
This is based on a sample of about N [I can’t tell you how many] – but is true with a significance of 0.NN [were I to tell you either of those digits, my colleagues in the S#S would be obliged to neutralize you].
Fortunately, my paper has been peer-reviewed by several other S#@*es – all of whom wish to remain anonymous – and accepted for publication by the Editor’s Premiere Planet’s Personalities Panel, who, it seems, have public order reasons for not being identified.

But there we go – it’s proven that CAGW-supporting Climate scientists have a smaller ~@~@~@ ;@;@;’

Auto
Proudly Peer-reviewed Author [just don’t ask who or how!]

Hey – do I need to add /:Sarc?
If you think I don’t, please add.
if not – ignore.
This 797th Anniversary of the Battle of Lincoln

Consensus in science is just a waste of time. It’s like saying, we got 100 idiots to agree, so this is the absolute truth. Yea, because agreement is obviously the mark of correctness. Why if 200 doctors all agreed the best thing for your health was to jump off a bridge well I know some cartoonists who would obviously let others think for them and take the plunge.

Brandon Shollenberger says:
May 20, 2014 at 1:19 pm
Cold in Wisconsin, right now I know I want to have ratings for two different things:

1) Endorsement of the greenhouse effect
2) Endorsement of the idea humans are responsible for the majority of the observed warming.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I’m not sure what you accomplish with those two categories. Endorse the GHE? My expectation is that you’ll wind up with 100% or close to it. As for your second category, you’ll find lots of papers that begin with the premise that this is true and then go on to analyse something completely different in that context, which is completely different from providing a science analysis to show that the premise is correct. So I’m not sure what these two categories accomplish.

This is a great post and I encourage all SkSers to consider his notion of the “long game”. What we’re doing with our climate communication is a marathon, not a sprint, and we need to adjust our strategy accordingly.

While it’s fun getting into stinks with Pat Michaels and Anthony Watts, we should be thinking more long-term than spats with denier blogs.

The Consensus Project is an example of taking a longer view – developing a long-term campaign of seeping the notion of a “strengthening consensus” into the public consciousness.

We should be thinking of other long-term projects that while not providing the immediate hit of a short-term controversy, will have a longer-term effect on the public perceptions of climate change.

It might be enlightening to see if a target consensus value i.e. “97%” was discussed before the data was actually collated.
Barry Woods comment May 20, 2014 at 9:21 am “The Consensus Project [TCP], 2012-01-19 Marketing Ideas” by JC might ahead some light on this.
In the list JC wrote:
“•Climate Communicators: There needs to be a concerted effort (spearheaded by me) to get climate communicators using these results in their messaging. I’ve been hooking up with a lot of climate communicators over the last month and will be hooking up with more over the next few months so will be discussing these results with every climate communicator I can get hold of, including heavyweights like Susan Hassol and Richard Somerville, to discuss ways of amplifying this message.
Also Ed Maibach is doing research on the most effective way to debunk the “no consensus” myth so I hope to contact him and hopefully include our results in his research. The more we can get climate communicators incorporating our results into their messages, the better.”

I wonder if “97%” came up in these discussions as a target goal. Of course this would require a FOIA request to be honored that reveals all the communications JC and other team members had with any “Climate Communicator” such as Susan Hassol, Richard Somerville, and Ed Maibach, or any other marketing personal they communicated with before the official results were known.

The raters images at SkS are interesting. One rater that stands out is dana1981. Look at Image 2 covering 19/02/12 to 08/03/12 (US= 02/19/12 to 03/08/12). Dana1981’s figures are a dead straight line from 25/02 to 07/03. On 08/03 there is nothing. This must have been an oversight, as Image 3, covering 19/02/12 to 15/03/12 (US= 02/19/12 to 03/15/12) , continues this dead straight line. In fact in 19 days dana1981 manages to go from reviewing 250 to 1100 images. That is 50 per day. This mystery reviewer seems to have some very regular habits.

“I would have thought that the response rates to a survey request from a supposedly respected climate scientist (i.e. Cook) on such an important topic would get a much higher hit rate than an anonymous marketing survey appeal.”

Maybe that’s just it. The non-responders had no respect for Cook or his cohorts.

Why does all of this bring to mind the legal Maze of the Mannotaur?
I’m not a lawyer but I don’t think any of this Cook-ing the books stuff is anything to get steamed up about. They’ll stew in their own juice.

davidmhoffer, that we might get ~100% agreement on the first statement is intended. Skeptical Science got a value of 97% by mixing my 1 and 2 together. If we split them apart, we’ll find one is higher and the other is lower. That shows a central flaw of their approach. It’d also mean everyone could say, “I’m part of the consensus.”

As for my 2, the fact many of those papers wouldn’t be offering evidence for the consensus position is irrelevant. Most material which makes up a consenus does not seek to offer evidence for the underlying consensus. It seeks to build upon that consenus. It’s neither surprising nor remarkable. It’s just a limitation on what you can say about the data.

It’s also something of a non-issue. There are a lot of papers in the Cook et al data set rated as “Endorse AGW” even though they don’t say anything about how strong a role humans have played. A re-analysis like I describe could easily wind up with results like:

John Cook:
“Damn, I only find out now that I could’ve been rating all this time on the iPad? So much lost opportunity! I just did a half hour exercise on the cross trainer and knocked off 30 ratings while I exercised. I could have spent the last month of exercise racking up 1000 ratings!”

Ari Jokimäki:
“I also have had rather pleasant moments with rating; in the other day I practiced my guitar playing and rated papers at the same time. :) “

It makes you ashamed to be living in this country when these clowns come out to play! Like in so many things in this once great land, they have become a law unto themselves. There has been two cases (as far as I know) in other areas where the High Court of the land have harpooned these types, declaring that they had no power to implement such rules. Next action please! More money please!

Just when you think they must have reached the bottom of the cesspit of ‘climate science’ at the University of Queensland the members of their varsity team (SkS) prove you wrong!

Why would anyone believe a word they say?

At least there is no danger of any science getting in the way of their politics and religion. The pathetic childishly written threatening ‘legal’ letter in an attempt to continue to block freedom of information requests and freedom of speech shows they now think they are some sort of ‘Climate Police’.

It appears that the data requested should have been supplied as it was under a ‘creative commons license’ to facilitate ‘open access’ and was already available on the SkS site!

Does ‘freedom of information’ and the ‘creative commons license’ only apply if the requester is a sympathetic convert of ‘the team’?

Unfortunately, too many folks think that the issues in Cook’s 97% consensus paper can be resolved via a different and better analysis of Cook’s data (i.e., if we know more about the paper/analysis, we can find its faults). Maybe, but with “Garbage IN”, no analysis of data can really derive a meaningly conclusion — for or against.

I believe Cook’s data is Garbage & subsequently cooked (Yewwww!). Given such bad (biased and uncertain) data, no analysis method can extract a meaningful (true) conclusion. Bad definitions, bad criterion, sloppy evaluation etc. The entire Cook assessment seems to have been an ad hoc analysis structured to derive a pre-conceived conclusion. Yes, I am biased Yet, I have no doubt I’m not the only one, on either side of the debate.

Anthony, the date of the article published in the Australian – (The Australian, 17 March 2013) – is wrong. It was actually published on 17th of May, so I was going to point it out to you. Before I did, however, I checked the UQ news page at http://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2014/05/uq-and-climate-change-research … and that’s where the wrong date came from.
Yet, the “UQ and climate change research” page has this comment at the bottom:
“Media: communications@uq.edu.au, ph +617 3365 1120.
*This statement has been updated to reflect the correct publication date of The Australian article.”
Something’s not right with that University when they can’t even correct an error without making another error in the process…
Still, the date should read “May”, not March. The ink itself is ok, it points to the right article.

Only information that might be used to identify the individual research participants was withheld.
=============
How is it that a University, supposedly a seat of higher education, can’t tell the difference between researchers and participants?

for friggin’ sakes. the researchers are not research participants. the participants are the people under study – the people that wrote the original papers – the 97%.

the researchers are the people conducting the study, and they are not covered by confidentiality. Quite the opposite. You want to know who conducted the research to make sure they didn’t have an axe to grind.

Our is the U or Q now claiming that what was being studied was not the published research papers, but rather how the Raters rated the papers? Because I don’t see it. Unless Cook was studying the Raters and not the papers being rated, the Raters have no claim to confidentiality. Which is self-evident in the way Cook and SKS have freely identified the Raters.

Thus, the U of Q is apparently trying to mislead, by confusing researchers and participants and mixing them all together as research participants. Under this “formula” not even Cook could be identified as an author, because he was a participant.

So, you have this group of humans who be it a large number or a small number just happen to answer the teachers questions as taught life long by “Red Commie Redistribution of Wealth” PHD’s of the World Wide U.N. University’s of note.

The suprise should be that its not 100%. It may be the ones who are in the 3% are in fear of their lives should they be exposed as not going along. They are the ones who hired atty’s to keep the info under raps.

albertkallal says:
May 20, 2014 at 11:57 am
So the reviewers and people who “peer” review this paper are to be a University secret? How can one trust and even know that the paper was then reviewed? Perhaps the review was by someone named Mr. Rubber Stamp!
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Kangaroo Courts operate behind closed doors. Is U of Q using Kangaroo Review?

Given the list of reviewers and the limited time [frame] for review versus the significant quantities of abstracts to be ‘graded’, there may be some issues of misappropriated time, i.e., was the work done during the course of their nominal business hours and was this tantamount to fraudulent time charges? Might be interesting to sniff that one out…

Consider: a professor gives a test to a group of students, to “research” how well they have learned a subject. The students are the study participants. A Teaching Assistant (TA) then marks the papers. The TA is not a participant. The TA did not take the test. The TA is assuming the role of the researcher, to assist the professor in conducting the study.

So is the university claiming to own SS?
I could twist their words that way, it seems very strange they mention an ethics approval for Cook and lay claim to content on SS.
Would Cookie Boys claims of SS’s financial independence also be suspect?

As a former academic, I can assure everyone that the academic environment, far from being free, is so ideologically hidebound as to be as intolerant of dissent as Nazi Germany. UQ’s behavior is par for the course.
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I’m a former academic as well. I disagree with you though, as I believe Nazi Germany was more tolerant of dissent than the academic environment.

They mean the scientists who rated their own papers. You know the “research participants”- not the abstract raters. Are you deliberately being stupid?

Anyone on this blog that’s actually bothered to run the numbers (which are still available) would see there is overwhelming endorsement of AGW. Notice in particular all the big fat donuts in the bottom right hand quadrant of the matrix.

Well, you clearly are being deliberately stupid since they are not only withholding information (time stamps etc) concerning the self-rating scientist but also the raters (that is members of the Cook “research” team). You do have a valid point though concerning anonymity of the self-rating scientist, pity that you overplayed it.

Pethefin- The raters and members of the scientific team are listed either in the authors list or the acknowledgments if you actually bothered to read the paper. No wait, you just spout the same mindless conspiracy drivel as the rest of the tea baggers on this site. Has it ever entered your mind that scientists have important research to do and don’t want to waste their time engaging with a bunch of uneducated, brainwashed, delusional, foaming at the mouth crackpots?

Siberian Husky,
you might be suffering from frostbites since you forgot the main point of mine: why do you need to conceal the time stamps? And the identity of all of the raters has not been revealed. You do seem to be obsessed with some conspiracies, maybe something that you picked up from some obscure AGW alarm site. No one has made claims of conspiracy here. Many of the people here question the research methods and the following pathetic cover-up of what seems to be questionable “research” methodology. I do however understand that for a true dogmatic believer like you, all this is corresponds to blasphemy which explains you going ballistic. For you skepticism seems to be a curse word, for us an elementary part of all things science. Try to calm down, you language only makes you look bad.

This is much like the marxist-revisionist soviet model of the “democracy of the committed”; only those who were selected by the local Komsomol would be permitted to nominate for election, on a ballot paper with just one candidate. Within this framework, elections were freely and fairly held.

1) The data is not pertinent to “climate research.” It is putatively social or psychological research regarding people’s attitudes to climate research positions. The university argument is misframed at the beginning of its statment.

Brandon Shollenberger writes:

…. This one also identifies nearly a dozen individual participants. It’s true we only found out about these images because of a hack, but that hack happened nearly two years ago. Surely the authors of the paper shouldn’t leave confidential information in a publicly accessible location for two years, even if people have already seen it.

2) Contrary to Brandon Shollenberger’s view, the “data” were either initially publicly available, or they were initially copied from a “hacked” system They cannot be both. “Weak security” is not synonymous with “publicly available,” nor is publicly “accessible” necessarily intended to be publicly “available.” If the directory tree structure was not protected by permission settings that exclude casual viewers, then there might be a weakish argument for “public” accessibility, since an outsider can climb the tree structure without special permissions. However, that could be countered by arguing that a web site has a set of index.* files that lists what the page designer wants the public to see, what scripts they can initiate, etc., and the index file determines what should be publicly “available.” In such a case, good computer manners leaves non-indexed data be, even if you find it and read it. Sometimes what you are dealing with is p*&& poor computer and systems administration and security practices.

However, the short of it is that files may have been accessed that were not supposed to accessed by individuals with no permission to access them. If true, then the system was indeed “hacked” in the most simple minded of senses. Operator incompetence though will not excuse trespasser culpability. So the operator’s incompetence is moot in terms of whether it was “OK” to access the data simply because it was publicly accessible as opposed to available.

The operator could be sued by one of the participants if they could show that somehow their personal information and privacy were compromised due to incompetence on the part of the operator.

After a long time on Google Scholar I can say that only a small minority of abstracts flat out blame man’s greenhouse gases for most of the warming. They mention it but don’t attribute the majority of the warming.

Here is a quick, unscientific, and rudimentary check for the key words ‘climate change greenhouse gases’.

Below are the results EXCLUDING book reviews and a couple of citations. Not one gives a proportion of the warming due to man since any date. A look through page 2 of results shows 2 abstracts blaming man for most of the ‘modern’ warming and it’s co-author is Kevin E. Trenberth (2003).

One trouble for 97% advocates is they are tied to the hip forever to an absurd claim. Everything must be retrofitted to this number or the face the public humiliation and associated political loss of a declining “consensus”. That’s what prompted the full-stupid Cook paper to begin with.

As long as they can keep the meaning of “97%” like a wine tasting contest it can survive. Once it gets to actual surveys with specific questions to people not easily screened for political conformity it falls apart fast. If the next sham came up with “91%” consensus the wheels come off as well. That would be declining consensus, so they are trapped by their own absurdity.

Jimbo, you forgot to use quotes when searching for those phrases and second how did you exclude book reviews? You cannot filter out book reviews from Google scholar. You also failed to remove citations and patents, which you have to uncheck on the left hand side. There is much more erroneous content then simply books reviews and citations in Google Scholar. Things like books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, academic books, pre-prints, abstracts, and technical reports. A search for “anthropogenic climate change” is not going to give many results. The first result that comes up is a worthless power point presentation.

2) Contrary to Brandon Shollenberger’s view, the “data” were either initially publicly available, or they were initially copied from a “hacked” system They cannot be both.

The images were always publicly accessible. People simply didn’t notice them until after the server was hacked. In fact, they didn’t discover the images until months later. The hack uncovered information which led to the images, but that doesn’t mean “they were initially copied from a ‘hacked’ system.”

However, the short of it is that files may have been accessed that were not supposed to accessed by individuals with no permission to access them. If true, then the system was indeed “hacked” in the most simple minded of senses. Operator incompetence though will not excuse trespasser culpability.

Yes, it will. It was only “hacking” in the sense of, “I don’t like what you did so I’ll try to get you arrested.” It’s amazing you bring up “trespasser culpability” because the standards in this situation are no different than they’d be in an actual trespassing case.

Trespass requires one of two things: 1) The trespasser ignored a sign instructing them not to trespass; 2) The trespasser broke a “seal.” That is, they broke some sort of physical barrier intended to keep people out. That’s all that matters.

It doesn’t matter whether or not your presence in a location is desired. For your behavior to be wrong, you must have broken a barrier. The barrier can be created with words (a sign). The barrier can be created with a physical impediment (a fence.” It can be created with a password system (a gate.)

But if no barrier blocks access to something, nobody can trespass upon it.

Brandon is right. This so-called “hack” is no different than viewing a photo from a website, then stripping out the “.jpeg” part of the URL, and going straight to the originating home page. Even commenters at Volokh — practically all lawyers — have the opinion that Brandon did nothing wrong.

If you think he was ‘trespassing’, then probably Cook and the university think so, too — doubled and squared. They would surely use legal recourse if they could.

But they don’t, because they can’t. They are impotent. Tough noogies. They started this food fight. Now they don’t like the outcome. Tough noogies again.

2) Contrary to Brandon Shollenberger’s view, the “data” were either initially publicly available, or they were initially copied from a “hacked” system They cannot be both. “Weak security” is not synonymous with “publicly available,” nor is publicly “accessible” necessarily intended to be publicly “available.” If the directory tree structure was not protected by permission settings that exclude casual viewers, then there might be a weakish argument for “public” accessibility, since an outsider can climb the tree structure without special permissions. However, that could be countered by arguing that a web site has a set of index.* files that lists what the page designer wants the public to see, what scripts they can initiate, etc., and the index file determines what should be publicly “available.” In such a case, good computer manners leaves non-indexed data be, even if you find it and read it. Sometimes what you are dealing with is p*&& poor computer and systems administration and security practices.

The directory was publicly available, just not publicly advertised. Therefore it is fair game. If you are an incompetent system admin and leave directories view-able to the public that is your fault and you cannot later claim any sort of privacy on this information simply because you were incompetent. I scanned all of their domains a while ago and Cook had managed to lock them down from public view. As for the hacked forum information, I’ll post anything I want from it and there is nothing Skeptical Science or their legions of idiots can do about it.

I don’t think he did anything wrong. I’ve done my share of tree climbing too. What he should do is drop using the word “hack.” It paints a target on him that can be exploited by anyone really looking to harm him. The university should be quiet too. In terms of points, they are losing big time.

Consider, in the real world as opposed to the net, if there is an old broken-down fence between you and a field, and you cross that fence, you have committed trespass. It doesn’t matter that the fence would not keep horses in or cattle out. It is a clearly defined boundary with a clear intent. The owner who catches you on is property can have you arrested or very seriously talked to – been there, have the t-shirt, or at least a very clear memory of a heart to heart with two deputy sherrifs. On the other side of the argument, if a trespasser is actually injured the owner may very well be liable if a trespasser is injured, so he or she has to enforce that boundary. The problem with lawyer’s opinions is that there are at minimum two lawyers in every trial, and in very close to 100% of all cases, one of those opinions is wrong. Therefore … you do the math. Besides, it isn’t the lawyers, or their opinions that count; the sole important opinions are the judge’s and the jury’s. Ideally nothing will come of this except red faces on the part of the jury and a release of properly scrub data that should never have been sequestered.

I stand by my first point. This data is social “science” of the worst kind that is being argued over here. It has nothing to do with climate and everything to do with politics.

Hey guys. All the time I’ve spent on the Cook et al paper has made me re-visit an idea I had some time back. I discuss it a bit in a new post of mine. The short version is, I’m thinking about creating a web site to allow for a public re-analysis of the “consensus.”

The interesting point you also miss Duster is if Brandon Shollenberger is guilty of hacking or trespassing as you want to call it there is an issue of negligence. There is a list a mile long of test cases and findings of negligence in the wake of hacks try Sony PS3, Target lately who lost credit card details.

It is clear that Brandon Shollenberger did not set out to hack SKS but if you want to claim damage from his actions and they were illegal then there is also a negligence case to be answered by someone at the SKS website. It is no different to Sony or Target losing personal credit card details the hacker did the act and a negligence case existed because the companies did not take adequate security measure and SKS would be facing the same issue.

In the light of the above it would indeed be interesting to know what the relationship is between SKS and University of Queensland because it make a case very interesting indeed.